CDG215 | Digital Government Clinic

This elective builds on the public law, law and technology, and constitutional law offerings in the programme. While those courses introduce students to doctrinal frameworks and analytical tools, the Digital Government Clinic extends that foundation into the empirical and institutional terrain of India’s rapidly evolving digital public infrastructures (DPI) and their associated legal and governance effects. Drawing from legislation, key policy documents, and doctrinal sources, the course is designed as an applied and practice-oriented complement: one that enables students to hypothesize, interrogate, and respond to the governance challenges generated by contemporary technology infrastructures. It may be taken as a standalone elective, though students with prior exposure to constitutional law and law and technology will find it particularly enriching.

The course foregrounds engagement with cross-disciplinary literatures that shape current debates on digital governance, including political economy studies of infrastructure, political theory of digital technologies, critical infrastructure studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), critical data studies, and AI ethics. The deliberate emphasis on interdisciplinary learning is due to the increasingly prevalent, and simultaneously under-examined legal, constitutional, and governance effects of AI-powered digital infrastructures on citizens’ rights to privacy, information, and participation.

Students will engage closely with primary legal and policy materials, including statutes, regulations, draft guidelines, departmental schemes, strategy papers, and relevant technical standards, with a focus on two major sectors: credit markets and healthcare. These will be supplemented by landmark judicial decisions that illuminate how legacy infrastructures have historically been governed under pre-AI regulatory logics, and how those logics are being reconfigured by emerging digital architectures.

The course is taught primarily in a seminar format, with short lectures (15–20 minutes) introducing key technical, political, and legal concepts, followed by Socratic discussions of readings, case studies, and counterfactual exercises. Students are expected to come prepared, having studied the readings carefully to enable deep, reflective engagement in class. A distinctive pedagogical feature of the clinic is its emphasis on collaborative, bidirectional learning through sustained interaction with technologists, researchers, and policy analysts. Students will have the opportunity to interact with researchers from the Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) at IIT Madras, and UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Students will conduct sectoral audits and evaluate start-ups and technical innovations built atop India’s DPI stack, tracing their constitutional and governance implications. In turn, they will receive feedback from technical experts on the feasibility and design of their proposed institutional interventions. For example, students might map the value chain of a health technology start-up, identify blind spots and optimization logics, and propose regulatory or institutional frameworks responsive to those findings.